Abstract
Media Events offer a recent example of the continuous transformation of the form ‘event’ throughout history. Illustrating the performative power of dramatic gestures, they characterize moments of heightened participation in the public sphere and the emergence of ‘performing publics’. Media Events must be compared to other sorts of ‘expressive events’, including ‘pseudo-events’ and conflictual events. We note that this variety involves enlisting broadcasters by agencies of the establishment or by forces of disruption. Assessing them in the context of ‘globalization’ involves noting that there are many conflicting globalizations. Despite their respective dogmatisms, both critical and functional approaches illuminate the interplay of hegemony and solidarity in the very same events. We speculate on the future of the genre in the age of social media and heightened audience skepticism.
Keywords
Few authors have the opportunity of obtaining a 25-year delay to disclose their ‘staircase wit’. These great critiques deserve thoughtful responses. Working on them was quite enjoyable given the wealth of insights and challenges we found in this impressive group of papers.
Yet we had to repress the urge to cite each author, be it to applaud, to expand, or to protest. The points they made are sharp enough, distinctive enough, to be easily identified. In addition to present company, we wish to thank all those who have contributed to this conversation, noting the recent loss of Gladys Lang and Tamar Liebes. Some are acknowledged in our book, others have been cited here by our respondents, and still others anticipated this discussion. We are thinking of Edward Shils and Michael Young’s ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’ (1953), Kurt and Gladys Lang’s ‘The Unique Perspective of Television and Its Effects’ (1953) and Steven Lukes’ ‘Political Ritual and Social Integration’ (1975). Of course, deep thanks go to editors Paddy Scannell and Julia Sonnevend for conceiving and organizing this special section of Media, Culture & Society (MCS). We wish also to thank Yonatan Fialkoff for editorial assistance.
Reviewing the papers, we noticed three recurrent themes that question whether we understated a hegemonic interpretation of our story, whether we overstated the present and neglected past and future, and whether our story belongs to the past anyway, since the social media and other constraints have put the genre of Media Events to rest. But rather than one-on-one replies, or an all-encompassing essay, let’s try something different. We have selected a group of key words that, in our opinion, represent the issues that have been raised – typically in more than a single critique. These issues, and others, will appear and reappear as we proceed, each of us at his own pace, but by now, both preferring elevators to staircases. First Dayan, then Katz.
Daniel Dayan
Limits
Media Events and expressive events
Our definition of Media Events was perhaps too narrow. It may have led to the expectation that we would discuss all media and all events. In fact, of course, we chose to highlight only certain kinds of events (consensual events, ceremonial events) and only one medium (network television). This led to expectable critiques. Consensual events are only one among many genres of symbolic events (conflictual events, news events, pseudo-events). To make our mission clearer, we specified the ‘scripts’ of our genre in terms of ‘contests’, ‘conquests’, and ‘coronations’, but we could also have stressed the limits between our Media Events and other genres. For example, all it takes is the status of a participant to turn a pseudo-event (shallow play) into a media event (deep play). We could have situated Media Events within a corpus of expressive events and compared them to all these other forms of action that rely on visibility and exemplarity.
Core and suburbs of the event
Is something one event or many? In a liturgical song that concludes the Jewish festival of Passover, the story of Exodus is presented as a list of distinct events such as splitting of the Red Sea, allowing the fugitives to pass on dry land, drowning the soldiers of Pharaoh, providing many years of manna, and decreeing the 10 commandments. One could go on, but how far? How does one distinguish core events from accompanying incidents? How does one sever the event itself from what surrounds and what follows? 9/11 starts as a series of suicide attacks meant to destroy passenger planes. Should we decide that the collapse of the twin towers is nothing but a consequence of the real event? Is there a hard core to be distinguished from a mere context? The ‘Charlie Hebdo’ and ‘Hyper Cacher’ massacres of January 2015 in Paris were preceded by a flurry of smaller attacks against civilians and police officers. Were these attacks independent incidents? Only in the case of performed events, of events as performances – as in the case of Media Events – can one delineate the contours of an event. Yet is what is delineated still an event?
Events or ceremonies?
There is something numinous about events. An event occurs when new and unanticipated realities enter the world. The moment of birth is an event. The moment when death settles as a new presence on a once familiar face is also an event. Events mean change. Yet, the events we described were preplanned. They were not epiphanies. They were ceremonies that were anticipated and scripted and displayed for a purpose. Were we correct in speaking of ‘events’?
In fact, the term ‘event’ refers to two almost antithetic realities, to realities that are as distinct as stimulus is from response, as imbalance is from stability. What we know as an event is a trade-off between disorder and a form of order; between disorder and a historically determined cultural form. On one hand, there is a vacillation in the order of things, an eruption whose amplitude cannot be precisely delineated. On the other hand, any attempt at displaying such a vacillation requires giving it a shape and a size. These two antithetic realities paradoxically share the same name: an ‘event’.
These two realities also form a sequence. One supplants the other. An event is a disorder engendered by the rupture of a given equilibrium. But what we usually see is the response to this disorder, the social construction that addresses it. After a while, we, as spectators, only know of the event as disorder, by means of its antithetic other: the displayed event. The event that reaches us is like a question we must guess from the answer it received.
Dramaturgic decisions
The inbuilt contradiction of events translates into dramaturgic choices.
A major event initially takes the form of a triggering incident. It ends up as a collective performance. A triggering incident would seldom be considered an event were it not for the response it receives. Collective performances underline an incident’s import; they provide the validation it requires to become an ‘event’. But are such collective performances part of the event or merely its aftermath? And is the triggering incident, part of the event, or merely its prelude? What one chooses to treat as event involves not only a dramaturgic choice but also a significant political decision. To antiterrorists, the real event is the terror act. To their opponents, antiterrorist actions are the only events that count.
All this means that major events should be discussed in terms of two hardly dissociable steps. An event is a dialogue between a prompting occurrence and a collective performance. Stressing one or the other may lead not only to constructing different dramaturgies but also to producing different events. Those who decide to stress one moment only are betraying what has been called the ‘restlessness’ of events (Wagner-Pacifici, 2010).
History and form
Attaching the adjective ‘historic’ to the events we dealt with was not entirely original. To those who used the term, it was a way of stressing the importance of an event. It means that a given broadcast has to be taken seriously and that in contrast to ‘pseudo-events’, it involved what might be called ‘deep play’. There is a paradox here, of course: How can events that are only ‘symbolic’ turn into historic realities?
Media Events interested us for another reason. To traditional forms of historiography, history was made of events. Events were the gist of history. They provided explanatory devices, intellectual tools, instruments for articulating temporalities. Events were a way of thinking continuity, discontinuity, beginning, origin, and causality. On the contrary, the Annales school claimed that history was not to be studied as a succession of events (which would condemn the realities in between to an interstitial status) but in terms of periods of long duration. For Annales historians, events were a superficial foam over deeper waters. They were only relevant if one saw them as ostensible manifestations of more significant structures. In themselves, they were unimportant.
Interestingly, our book coincided with the Annales decision to return to the study of events. This renewed interest in events was also that of sociologists (Morin), textual analysts (Barthes), and psychoanalysts (who debated the reality of traumatic events). Paul Ricoeur (1992) commented on this evolution in his essay Le retour de l’Événement, also published in 1992.
This led to events being seen as architectures. Like childhood, sexuality, punishment, or surveillance, they were to be discussed as configurations that typified a given period. A child in the Roman Empire had little in common with a child in the 18th century. The notion of ‘adolescence‘ was altogether unknown at certain times. What motherhood implied kept changing over centuries. The Annales School was quite aware that realities bearing the same name at different epochs could be no less diverse than comparable institutions in different civilizations. This was also the case for events.
In his 1869 preface to War & Peace, Tolstoy put it succinctly. ‘The historian’, he said ‘is concerned with the outcome of an event. The artist is concerned with the event itself’. In that sense, our approach has been that of Tolstoy’s artists. We felt that events deserved specific attention as forms to be assessed. We were less preoccupied with the causes, consequences, or underlying structures of events than with ‘events themselves’.
Our basic presupposition was that this form of events depended on the nature of the dominant media at a given time. By concentrating on a type of event that was emblematic of the end of the 20th century, we were contributing to a history of forms. This is perhaps why our early papers attracted the attention of the journal Les Annales. Such a history of forms is more relevant than ever now that events are changing shape again, morphing from broadcast mode to digital mode.
On the side of the broadcast paradigm, stand our theatrical Media Events with their strong focalization, unified perspective, deliberate scripting, and almost initiatic temporality, a temporality that organizes the unfolding of the event in terms of access to a higher sort of time. On the side of the digital paradigm, multiple feeds lead to a diversity of focalizations and to a labyrinthian structure. The notion of a dominant emplotment is replaced by a maze of ‘assemblages’ and ‘distributed configurations’. The distinction between sacred time and profane time is reversible.
Media Events as laboratory
Media Events do not merely differ from the forms that replaced them. In a way, they generated these forms. While the ‘time out’ character of Media Events made them clearly distinct from everyday news, Media Events may have functioned as a laboratory where an updated language of news was being invented. Many formal characteristics of today’s news come from Media Events. Think of their ambition of exerting a quasi monopoly on public attention; of their unfolding in every direction at the expense of lesser news, now relegated to the bottom of TV screens; of their using the ‘live’ format to offer a collective experience instead of a mere account of disconnected incidents. The resulting ‘stories’ end up being neither news nor the Media Events we used to know. The status of these stories no longer needs to be decided in advance: technologies of recording and broadcasting are supple enough to allow improvising the status of a classic Media Event whenever desired. Opting for classical theater or ‘commedia dell’arte’ is a last-minute decision.
Performing publics and reception
For whom is something an event? For whom does a piece of news matter? For whom is performance ‘deep play’? These are some of the questions posed by the reception of events. There are cases in which the answer is obvious. Thousands of communists around the world saw their life collapsing at the announcement of Stalin’s death. They saw themselves as ‘orphans’ and let it be known to others. They saw fit to make a display of their emotions and became dramaturgic publics in the process.
What we learned about reception in the course of our study had to do with the behavior of such dramaturgic publics rather than from an enterprise of data gathering (be it audience measurements or the sort of applied semiotics that was known at the time as ‘reception studies’). Media events offered the possibility of looking at modes of reception that were in themselves performances.
Media Events, like many other occasions, were a way of ‘performing’ the public sphere, of making it exist, of bringing it to life. In other terms, even though it generates institutions and relies on the stability of these institutions, a public sphere is not offered to us as a continuous experience. Only at certain high moments, does it come to life. The high moments produced by Media Events were situations in which the multiple public spheres (cf. Habermas’ critics) came together, forming a sphere of publics, a sphere in which various publics became aware of the existence, preferences, and loyalties of other publics.
The performances we observed pointed to a ‘centering’ (as opposed to the usual scattering) of public attention. This centering was expressed in the implicit obligation to attend an event’s broadcast or in the transformation of home into an extension of the public sphere. Despite this centering, the performances we observed were not always consensual. They could enact various modalities of rejection: deliberate avoidance of certain events, ironic endorsements of others, manifestations of jocular enthusiasm, appropriation and re-scripting of ceremonies as in the populist hijacking of Diana’s funeral, refusal of French school kids to identify with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, manifestations of contemptuous sarcasm such as those of Mexican architects hailing the collapse of the twin Towers as a ‘work of art’ and ‘democratization of Neronism’.
The publics we observed were publics that made themselves visible. They were performing publics, as opposed to these other publics that require from their observers that they should put on the goggles of methodology.
Globalization(s)
Did we insufficiently account for the role of Media Events in a global context? Media Events, we are told, are ‘the insignia of contemporary globalization’, to which we now would add the idea of multiple globalizations, that is, the possibility of many simultaneous globalizations confronting each other. We wish to raise the possibility of globalizations and counterglobalizations, of globalizing projects, with their narratives and counternarratives, and with their respective sorts of expressive events.
These events are dominated by different moods and express different emotions. For example, hope was emblematic of ‘conquests’, as in the case of Sadat, the moon landing or Mandela. As John Paul II put it to his Polish audiences, ‘Courage, don’t be afraid!’ But hope was also present in tragic situations where it typically inspired dramaturgies of challenging despair.
In contrast to events promoting hope, humiliation serves as the dominant feeling of today’s terror events. While in earlier times, terror events claimed to sensitize us to distant sufferings, most terror events today claim to be responses to humiliation. Such responses involve a punitive ambition, a wish for revenge. The main protagonists of the resulting dramaturgies are corrupt polities and exterminating angels.
Each globalizing project uses Media Events to allow certain groups of nations to entertain convivial relationships with each other. Depending on the event, some members of these groups step on stage; others remain in the audience. Performances illustrate narratives that are shared by all. Drawing a map of where events occur, one notes that their sites keep changing. For any given nation, to host a media event is a sign of recognition. Some do not even try. Thus, for a long time, South Africa had been the ‘pariah’ of the democratic community. At one point, it hosted a string of Media Events. That such events were broadcast internationally was a major form of recognition. South Africa could now serve as an emblem of the ‘common center’.
Kula rings
Each group of nations thus forms a convivial circle, an equivalent to the ceremonial exchange system that Malinowski (1922) observed in the Trobriand Islands and described as a ‘kula ring’. Seen from this angle, Media Events serve as ceremonial currency. In a dramaturgic give and take, communities of nations affirm their common values. Interestingly, such exercises in globalism also concern events that are conflictual. Thus, when French state television treated in media event style (albeit without the ‘live’ dimension) the alleged shooting in cold blood of a Palestinian boy and his father by Israeli soldiers, the resulting video was sent free of charge to about 60 countries invited to join in condemnation. This strengthened ties within a given community of nations. Expressive events may be inscribed in Kula rings, but such rings are involved in a tough, agonistic conversation. There is a battlefield of expressive events.
Dogmas?
After 9/11, we felt that certain types of Media Events (integrative, consensual) were no longer dominant in their power to attract the world’s attention. We were told, however, that the conflictual events we saw as newly dominant had in fact been there all along. It was our integrative perspective that had been blinding us to their existence. It was not the nature of events that had changed, it was our refusal to assess their true character.
We would like to reply that the consensual dimension on which we concentrated was not a mirage. We did not dream it. It was indeed there. Moreover, even those events that we now acknowledge as disruptive may have an integrative dimension. Were consensual events nothing but agonistic events with a consensual mask?
Making such a claim involves a danger: that of overlooking the actual dramaturgy of events, as if this dramaturgy existed only as a lure. Must the peace proposed by Sadat be dismissed as a decoy or a trap? But why should such an interpretation be truer than the consensual one that takes this visit at face value? Durkheimian theory is typically accused of being the mere unraveling of a dogma, a cult rendered to the Goddess ‘society’. But are things really different with the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion?’ Is it impossible to see in the latter, the same dogma in reverse? Both integration theory and critical theory have the virtue (and the defect) of being unfalsifiable. Analysts thus find themselves in the difficult situation of having to choose between two symmetrical dogmatisms.
The solution to this dilemma might consist of using one dogma against the other; of accepting the fact that each of them delivers part of the solution to our descriptive problem. Such is perhaps the point of Steven Lukes’ (1975) retreat from critical dogmatism by widening his definition of power. Lukes’ ‘power’ consists not only of ‘power over’ but also of something much more subtle – the ‘power to’.
Applied to our events, Lukes’ reformulation means that consensual events are endowed with the ‘power to’ bring together various currents of a society, but that they also allow certain groups to exert ‘power over’ other groups. Consensual events emphasize specific versions of solidarity and consequently promote the interests of some groups at the expense of others. Certain versions of solidarity are akin to Benjamin’s ‘history of the victors’. Yet, the solidarity they bring about cannot simply be pushed aside as a nefarious illusion. Could any society survive without a minimal amount of solidarity?
Elihu Katz
Effects: Yes, the book is about effects, but not the usual kind. The relentless search for effect in communication research has so far focused on persuasion, that is, on (1) messages (2) aiming to change (3) opinions, attitudes, behaviors (4) of individuals (5) in the short-run. In contrast, the focus of Media Events is on whole societies and their integration. The book is about a genre of broadcasting that invites participation in a national, or global, ceremony whose latent function, in both short and long run, is to reinforce societal integration and, sometimes, to trigger social change. We believe that these events exemplify the real power of television, even if it is difficult to quantify social integration or to attribute causality in the trajectory of social change. We are certainly interested in transformative events – such as Sadat’s overture of peace or the fall of the Berlin Wall – but change is not essential to our definition. Inevitably, some critics will perceive only hegemonic intent in the staging of such ceremonies and will see social integration as a means to mobilize ‘consent’. Maybe so. But our emphasis is on the need, or wish, for tribal unity, for ‘collective heartbeat’. Indeed, we describe Media Events as products of a combined ‘demand’: for ceremony on the part of establishments, broadcasters who are truly independent, and the populace. Obviously there are ‘coalitions’ between establishment and broadcasters! Events will ‘fail’ without the support of all three (think summitry, e.g., in which audience confidence faded). Maybe we are/were overly romantic (or naïve or functionalist), but that is what the book is about.
Disruptive events: Yes, the book deals with interruptions of routine that are rehearsed in advance, well advertised, and much anticipated. Yes, we were criticized from the very first for bypassing disruptive events such as the terror at the Munich Olympics or choosing to discuss Kennedy’s funeral, not his assassination. We later regretted this exclusion, even while explaining that the media could not arrive in time to provide live coverage or because they could not mobilize viewers on a moment’s notice. True, we did not focus on these aspects of production until later. On further thought, we wish to note, first, that free broadcasters ‘like’ forces of disruption (terrorists or tsunamis) and form coalitions with them against establishments. Second, that disruption, too, may contribute to the thickening of social bonds, as everybody (except terrorists) knows.
Reception: True, we have only sparse evidence from viewers who witnessed televised events. But we know of sports fans who remember that their team won, even though it lost, or that it was virtual when TV showed that humans had landed on the moon. And we know about Egyptians who were so irate over Sadat, and Israelis who so hated Rabin, that they assassinated them, and mutatis mutandis, we have heard that some people crossed the Channel rather than witness the Royal Wedding. On the other hand, we think that these readings were, indeed, deviant. Thus, we have survey data to show how Sadat succeeded in shifting Israeli opinion, and we know, from the press, of the thrill of the Diana events, the World Cup, and other sporting events. Nevertheless, we sense that cynicism has arisen over the veracity and value of ceremonial events such as these, and that this skepticism is one element, among others, that is clouding the reception – and indeed the very future – of such events.
Space: We are scolded for overstressing space and understating time. As for space, we are said to be captives of the idea of the nation state and to respect its boundaries. It is implied that we see Media Events being played out in a national arena. While shared language is a better statement of our bias, there is more than a little truth to the allegation. On the whole, however, it should be clear that we are well aware of the arbitrariness of certain boundaries, the diasporic spread of certain peoples, the walls that divide certain states, and of the idea of globalism. Ironically, we are criticized for overlooking the ways in which Media Events temporarily obliterate everything else on the agenda of political reality, proposing centers of their own – like the moon. In short, we are asked again to face up to the accusation that we, ourselves, are naïve victims of false consciousness.
Time: We deal with the ‘privilege’ of the live broadcasts of certain ceremonial events. We emphasize the moment about which Bob Simon exclaimed, upon Sadat’s emerging from his plane, ‘will miracles never cease?’ Nevertheless, some of our critics are dissatisfied over why we pay so little attention to where these events come from. Where/when were they hatched? The answer is that we DO pay attention, however, superficially. We stress that these events often come to relieve long-standing conflict, such as the Christian–Communist tensions that led the Pope to fly to Warsaw, or the East–West tensions that were relieved by the fall of the Wall, or the prelude to Mandela’s release from prison. The producers of such events typically stress not only their presentness but also their past. And as amateur historians, we certainly try to deal with time, although we mostly stop short of questions relating to the construction of an event, or to how events enter collective memory (even when they may not actually have taken place). It’s true that we do not follow the progressive influence of events into the future, and retroactively, whether they really qualify as ‘the live broadcasting of history’. By ‘history’, of course, we mean that the event WANTS to be an historic occasion, if not a transformative one, at least a memorable marker of change, or a model for subsequent events. It is certainly worthwhile to follow the diffusion of the genre.
Old Media: Have we forgotten radio? What about the live broadcasts on radio from the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoons for the community of buffs or the World Series games that marked season’s end? The answer is that, unlike radio, television events ‘speak’ for themselves. They make more ‘room’ for the audience, as McLuhan suggested. They arouse more emotion.
New Media: We are on the verge of the Big question: will Media Events survive post modernity? We think that they won’t. One of the reasons has to do with the proliferation of new media. These dispel the awe of ceremony and fill the air with endless interruption and talkback. They disperse the audience and make it hard to collect. They challenge authority, however legitimate, and do away with centrality. People imagine globalism but act local. They dream individualism but act the ‘lonely crowd’. And they are fed up with traditional television.
The End of Media Events? When we added disruptive events – human or natural – to our typology, we mistakenly thought that these were going to displace ceremonial events in frequency or attentiveness and do away with solidarity. But on second thought, we realized that they, too, had a ritualized script as ‘disaster marathons’, and they, too, often united entire societies. So, the blame for the coming demise of Media Events lies elsewhere. In addition to the new media, we think that the growing cynicism of the audience is to blame. Contests, conquests, and coronations have all become suspect: Olympic contestants are suspect of using drugs; presidential contestants don’t debate, they just insult; conquests like Trump’s seem unworthy; military coups are mistaken for coronations. It seems that the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ are winning out!
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.